Exhibition at the Design Museum Den Bosch, Netherlands 📅 June 7, 2025 – October 26, 2025 🕒 Approx. visit time: 90 minutes 📍 Design Museum Den Bosch, ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

Women as Technology – What does it mean?

The Design Museum Den Bosch’s recent exhibition, Women as Technology, offered a bold and provocative look at how femininity and technology have been intertwined throughout history. From pole-dancing robots to domestic appliances designed “for her,” the exhibition challenged the long-held belief that technology is a neutral, masculine domain.

Instead, Women as Technology invited visitors to explore how cultural assumptions about gender have been built into machines, voices, and tools — and how women themselves have been both the operators and the subjects of technology.

The Four Faces of “Women as Technology”

The exhibition unfolded through four provocative thematic chapters:

1. Women as Homemakers

From mid-century kitchens to household robots, this section explored the ways technology has reinforced, and occasionally liberated, the role of women in domestic spaces. Visitors encountered gleaming appliances, 1950s design, and the eerie promise of automation “made for her convenience.”

2. Women as Calculators

Before digital computers existed, women were computers. They performed complex calculations for astronomy, warfare, and science, yet their intellectual labor was often invisible. This section restored that history and examined how the language of early computing (“girl-hours,” “human computers”) shaped modern tech culture.

3. Women as Incubators

This section delved into reproductive technologies, from anatomical teaching models to IVF imagery and cyborg motherhood. It asked: how have women’s bodies been technologized, and what does it mean when machines mediate life itself?

4. Women as Pleasure Machines

Perhaps the most confronting part of the exhibition. Visitors encountered pole-dancing robots, synthetic voices, and sex tech that blurred the line between body and machine. This section asked: are women still being designed for technological pleasure, rather than as its designers?

Not Just History – A Mirror for Today

Through more than 200 objects, Women as Technology revealed that technology has never been neutral. The voice of your virtual assistant, the ergonomic shape of a vacuum cleaner, the marketing of a “smart” kitchen, all of these reflect gendered assumptions.

By presenting a mix of historical artifacts and futuristic designs, the show created a powerful timeline from past to present, where the question wasn’t “What can women do with technology?” but rather “What has technology done with women?”

The exhibition wasn’t simply about women in technology, but about understanding how the female body, image, and voice have been encoded into the technological world around us.

It was an urgent and often uncomfortable conversation, one that connected feminism, design, AI ethics, and the future of human-machine relationships.

Women as Technology

Although Women as Technology closed its run today, the Design Museum Den Bosch remains well worth a visit. The museum continues to explore the intersections of design, society, and technology through its thought-provoking exhibitions. It is a destination that never stops asking beautiful, challenging questions about the world we create.

🎟️ Tickets: Available at designmuseum.nl

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